At the beginning of my process, I was always set on creating a game with simple mechanics (with a little bit of focus on aesthetics) as this was my first time ever working with Unity and the thought of making an entire video game was daunting. Looking at a bunch of old, 8-bit flash games I used to play in my childhood, I decided to base my game off the concept where you are an ice skater whose job is to create holes around monsters in order to make them fall through. However, this concept was proven to be too complicated to code and implement in the game so I was unfortunately forced to scrap the idea and come up with another one. Which brings us to my present game. The objective of the game now is simple: avoid bumping into the monsters patrolling the ice and touch the button in time to get to the next level. The player loses health if they bump into a monster. You will be prompted to restart the level if you run out of time or health. The further you get, the more complicated the levels get, with more obstacles in your way. 

In terms of the game’s aesthetics, I’ve also decided to keep it simple and gave the game a boxy, low-poly design with 8-bit elements and a clean, frosty appearance. The color palette consists of many blues and whites since the game setting takes place in winter. Additionally, there are a few pops of orange here and there to give it some contrast. The top-down perspective in the game was also influenced by flash games from my childhood, as mentioned earlier.

When it comes to the experience of using Unity for the first time, I encountered many problems while creating my prototype. Firstly, I found it very complicated and overwhelming, which is obviously expected for your first time. However, because there are so many settings, assets, aspects, and buttons, I still found it hard to navigate the software at times. There were also many new terms specific to Unity that you have to understand in order to code and use Unity. With that said, I actually did start to get the hang of it near the end of my development. Another issue I faced was getting errors in my code, which prompted me to debug the code and spend hours looking for a resolution. There were simple mechanics and little details I wanted to add but I found that coding them in was more difficult than expected and led to more bugs or even breaking my game. 

Something I could’ve improved while working on this prototype was to make more time to learn and understand the software through more videos and articles, instead of being impatient and believing I could figure things out on my own. This cost me a lot of time in the long run. 

Through this experience, I’ve learned how difficult it is to create a game. It has led me to grow even more respect for any and all indie developers as it takes a lot of determination and persistence to learn and make a full-fledged game. Overall, when you start to understand how the program and code works, working with Unity is really fun! I am glad to have learned the basics of Unity, and I hope it will lead me to work on future projects.